Istanbul , Turkey -LRB- CNN -RRB- The questions Turks asked on Tuesday were tinged with fear .

`` What 's going on ? What happened ? Why ca n't I get into the subway ? '' asked an elderly woman in a white headscarf with several shopping bags as she stood outside the barricaded entrance to one of Istanbul 's busiest subway stations .

She was one of millions of Turks left confused and concerned by the worst power outage to grip the country in more than a decade .

Dozens of cities across Turkey lost power for hours on Tuesday .

Millions of people were affected , including passengers stranded on paralyzed trains and subways . Municipal workers were forced to evacuate Istanbul 's Marmaray Tunnel , where the black-out left commuters trapped deep beneath the rushing waters of the Bosphorus Strait .

More than 24 hours later , Turkish officials were still at pains to explain the power outage .

The energy minister suggested a possible failure in transmission lines . The prime minister did not rule out the possibility of a terror attack .

The mysterious collapse of much of the country 's energy grid triggered a burst of wild conspiracy theories across social media .

Some Twitter users went so far as to suggest the black-outs were a warm up for elections scheduled to take place in June .

There is fertile ground for rumor-mongering in Turkey .

Over the last five years , security forces have arrested hundreds of army generals , journalists , prosecutors , civil society activists and police commanders and accused them of being members of assorted plots aimed at toppling the government .

The government 's increasingly heavy-handed repression of public dissent , combined with overt censorship of the media and the internet , have also contributed to a hyper-polarized and deeply mistrustful political atmosphere .

Even Turkey 's veteran deputy prime minister , Bulent Arinc , recently observed that opposition supporters now look at him `` with hatred '' rather than the grudging respect he enjoyed when his political party first swept to power in elections in 2002 .

Meanwhile , mysterious black-outs are a sore spot for some Turks , after a surreal 2014 incident on election night -- allegedly involving a feline saboteur . That is -- a cat that allegedly wandered into a power transformer .

That was almost exactly a year ago , a smaller series of power outages affected some polling stations during nationwide municipal elections , prompting unsubstantiated accusations of vote rigging .

The ruling Justice and Development Party ended up winning by a comfortable margin , but few Turks were reassured by the energy minister 's explanation that the voting day black-outs were caused by a cat getting lost .

As electricity was just starting to come back on in Istanbul on Tuesday , a second crisis erupted .

Websites linked to an extremist leftist militant group known as the DHKP-C began publishing chilling photos of a masked man holding a pistol to the head of a hostage in front of communist flags .

Two gunmen had somehow infiltrated the Palace of Justice , the monolithic court house in the center of Istanbul . There they took hostage Mehmet Selim Kiraz , the prosecutor in charge of one of the most politically sensitive trials in the country .

The gunmen demanded the confessions of police officers accused of shooting a tear gas canister at Berkin Elvan , a 15-year-old boy who was critically wounded during anti-government protests that raged across Istanbul in 2013 .

The boy 's death after months in a medically-induced coma triggered a fresh burst of protests and riots against the government .

On Tuesday , in the midst of the hostage crisis at the court house , the Turkish government imposed a gag order banning broadcasters from reporting on the Palace of Justice siege .

The broadcast ban is a measure that the Turkish government has repeatedly used in recent years to stifle reporting on deadly terrorist attacks .

The government also famously shut down Twitter and YouTube in an effort to kill highly embarrassing political scandals involving corruption .

Ultimately , Tuesday 's court house siege ended in a deadly hail of bullets that left both gunmen dead and the prosecutor mortally wounded . Turkish officials say special forces raided the court house only after the militants began shooting .

Online and in the streets , some Turks began linking the massive electricity blackouts to the hostage-taking inside one of Turkey 's best-protected buildings , even though there is little to suggest the two incidents are connected .

Just hours after the shooting , tensions exploded yet again at the court house .

Istanbul 's police chief had called for a press conference . As journalists jostled their way through security at the entrance to the largely deserted courthouse , some bystanders began chanting `` government thieves . '' Just hours after a devastating lapse of security at the Palace of Justice , police began detaining the demonstrators hurling abuse at their elected government .

The reactions to Tuesday 's bewildering series of events revealed several truths about contemporary Turkey .

The country is tense and confused after years of back-to-back political crises .

Heavy-handed censorship has left the mainstream media widely distrusted and discredited by broad segments of society . And the absence of a common , credible space for sharing information has pushed critics of the government to the fringes of social media .

Amid the burst of optimism and civil society activism in the early heady days of the Arab Spring in 2011 , Turkey was often cited as a possible democratic model for countries in the Middle East . Many of those Arab countries have since descended into conflict , repression and instability .

In the meantime , Turkey feels increasingly vulnerable to demons of its own making .

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This week , Turkey was gripped by a massive power outage and a deadly hostage crisis

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Reactions reveal contemporary Turkey is tense and confused after years of political crises

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Censorship has pushed critics to fringes in country cited as democratic model for Mideast